Recently, I had a lively discussion on this important topic. Some participants welcomed the main thesis, while others raised various possible objections or questions. I decided to create a free-form piece, presenting the ideas I presented in the form in which they were first published - in Dutch - with the help of a translator and a little bit of editing.
The text is disordered and unsystematic, but the meaning is still quite clear behind the not quite clear structure.
I think that if an unmarried boy and girl are a couple, their strong sexual desire comes from a certain deficiency. Ideally, their relationship should be so rich and fulfilling without sex that it shouldn’t cause strong desires that are hard to resist. The situation was similar in Paradise.
Not generally strong desires, but actually strong sexual desires.
I believe in God the Creator. The theory of macroevolution has significant drawbacks, the main one being the lack of ‘intermediate links’. I’m not against sex, but it has a certain purpose, meaning, properties, and so on, which I wrote about. If you are interested, I can give you links to my works in which I write about my beliefs in English and Ukrainian.
But humans are different from all other creations of God, especially in their spiritual and physical nature, their image of God, and so on. Therefore, it makes no sense to consider a person to be one of the animals…..
In animals, sexual activities are mainly, if not exclusively, about procreation and have little to do with human freedom. But human relationships, and especially those with God, are quite different.
Some people think that marriage has no impact on people, especially on the biological level.
Some people tend to reduce one thing to another. In particular, they can say that sexual desire is purely biological, that it is associated with animals, and marriage, on the other hand, to a purely social phenomenon that binds people to each other and to some animals. This is called 'reduction'. But external similarities are not enough for such a classification. Do you think that human sexual desire and behaviour is not significantly different from that of animals?
From the Christian point of view, it is wrong to completely ‘divide’ a person into different dimensions, to try to consider them separately. A person is a holistic being. And this is what makes them different from animals.
Divorce exists to prevent a clear, evident evil. Divorce has no other purpose, and so it is much better if it is not necessary.
God created humans, animals, angels, etc., so this does not mean that ‘God has nothing to do with sex.’ ….. God has blessed people to be fruitful and multiply in marriage. The Son of God, that is, God, became human and even went through situations in which people tend to think about sex. But He did not have lust, let alone sex (He did not need them, and yet He is the mysterious Bridegroom of the Church). On the contrary, strong sexual desire is synonymous with lust. And the Bible is the Word, the Revelation of God, and it speaks a lot about these issues.
If a person feels sexual attraction, if they are attracted with love to sexuality, then they have the ability to have sexual drive. This is one thing, and it is really quite natural, just as the opposite state is natural. Both states are very natural. But if a person has a strong sexual desire, lust, then this is a completely different state. And it has its own peculiarities.
The main feature of lust is that it is not completely free, and therefore not sufficiently controlled. Free, desirable, and consensual sex and forced, unfree sex are not the same thing. The latter can even be a crime, such as rape. Thus, lust has a certain unfreedom in it, it is ‘a movement that takes place in a person beyond their freedom’.
Lust is like the desire to sleep, eat and drink. We have to eat,
drink, etc., we have these desires regardless of our freedom. Marriage
creates a relationship in which we can say that the freedom of one
person is in the other. See in particular my poem:
https://www.instagram.com/p/C6izPylsnYr/
See more about what has just been said:
https://oleksandr-zhabenko.github.io/en/Cup.html
I would also say that
we are talking about natural marriage, but in a sacramental church
marriage, God gives direct gracious help in this too.
Yes, we can say that lust outside of marriage comes from a certain deficiency. In the simplest, most general sense, it is a deficiency of the ‘other person’ and the level of satisfaction in the relationship, and most importantly, a deficiency of the ‘ holisticity of the sexual desire’ in that person.
I’m probably not expressing myself in the best way, I’m sorry, I need to comprehend things that are not well comprehended.
Source of the original post where I wrote my comments:
https://www.instagram.com/p/C7ZUysVNhTK